@kasdeya This made me go "huh" out loud, because I hadn't realized/thought about it like that. Like I'm on the anti censorship side, but there should be places on the internet that kids can go to be kids, and I didn't realize there weren't. I guess that also explains the stuff like private minecraft servers too, and I know (from middle school teachers) even classroom googlechats (whatever they are called).

@kasdeya I remember playing Poptropica back when I was in middle school.. back when that was a good game to play. Seriously kids need more spaces like that on the internet where they can go play and not be in any danger whatsoever

@kasdeya

Yes, but where do you make the profits that grow every year?

Until you can answer that question, the corporate world simply doesn't care.

@kasdeya @izzy Add to that the destruction of meatspace spaces for kids (or people in general) and the result isn't amazing.

@kasdeya in the "beginning" (i.e., the consumer-grade beginning) of the internet, there were spaces for children. The walled-garden likes of Facebook enshittified that, and now we have bizarre situations where helicopter parents don't allow children outside because "it's not safe", yet let them loose on the computer where they're groomed on Roblox and DIscord with no supervision

The Neopets and Club Penguins need to return and be properly supervised (too bad for meatspace; that needs thought)

@kasdeya kids just aren't easy enough to monatize unless you can profit from their labour or they manage to get unrestricted access to their guardian's credit card

@kasdeya it’s always “think about the children” until you actually have to think about the children

@kasdeya

In case you have any problems reading this:

“Kids used to have all these websites & spaces made specifically for them online (including virtual worlds such as Neopets and Club
Penguin), now it's like all they seemingly have are Roblox (which is currently in the midst of a controversy involving child safety concerns) and the same handful of social media apps
You usually hear people say "kids shouldn't be on the internet" or "kids should stay out of adult spaces" but very rarely do you hear someone say
"kids should have spaces made with them in mind" “

@kasdeya just restarted Dofus and this exact thought came to my mind! The GMs and mod teams know there's a bunch of millennials playing it who are now getting their kids on it.
The in game shop has a parental lock and the public channels are restricted to game related talks only which does prevent asshats. Also to play on the non free servers you need to validate your phone number so they can more effectively ban bad behaviour.

I was a bit annoyed by the last but then everything clicked when I saw the state of the chat. I wouldn't be scared to let my fictional kids play it without me actively checking on them.

Sadly those places are getting rarer and rarer..

@Natsura I had completely forgotten about the existence of Poptropica! I've been there too 😇

@kasdeya

@kasdeya whenever someone says "kids shouldn't be on the internet" I think of those that want to control and isolate them so they have no one else to go to. no one to help, no one to offer different perspectives.

@kasdeya Honestly the latter of the two commen statements plus your own last "consider:", need to go hand in hand. Not just both are true but one isn't possible in an effective manner without the other.

@yakkoj @kasdeya There were once many meatspace places for them, but all of those have either been destroyed or defunded through the Stranger Danger type campaigns and removal of effective community centers, the kinds that are ran by parents themselves with the free time and passion (with the necessary cross-accountability to keep predatory "volunteers" out); there's also something to be said about the role of rising childcare and living costs playing into that, obligating both parents (when both are present) into full time or greater work and thus no time for proper, involved care of their own kids. Also the different Euro-American attitudes of hyperindividualism applied to childrearing versus other cultures that have more collective childrearing approaches.

@kasdeya The problem with making spaces for kids is that the kids grow up. They make friends on these social platforms, so they have connections and do not want to leave their friends and community. Ten years later those kids have turned in to teenagers, celebrating edgelord rebellion as they find their independence, so your platform ends up full of inappropriate jokes, drug humor and sex.

The obvious solution is to expel them when they age out, but that's terrible for business.

@kasdeya If not for the profit, I could see that working... kid turns fifteen, a countdown appears, and they have one year to schedule their going-away party. Maybe at the end their avatar flies off on a rocket as all theif friends cheer for the good times before the account is disabled. Very Logan's Run. But no commercial platform is going to just throw away perfectly good ad-viewers, especially ones finally old enough to have money to spend on premium currency and accessories.

@kasdeya even roblox I feel was better for kids about a decade or so when I was playing as a kid, back when you couldn’t even use numbers in the chat in case it was an address or phone number. I always think they did a big mistake by trying to age up the roblox platform rather than using their technology to start a new parallel platform specifically targeted towards older teens/adults, while keeping roblox safely engineered for the kids

@lispi314 @izzy @kasdeya yeah there was really nowhere to go as a kid… local library shut down in 2012, got pushed out of the local handball youth club when it became more elite (though I never really cared much about sports to begin with), the local youth recreation center would be populated with the same kids who relentlessly bullied me in school and no adult there really cared about what was going on so I didn’t feel safe there. I guess there may have been more things out there back then but did not know about it at the time (some of those I later discovered had closed down permanently during the COVID era), and ended up being mostly isolated at home with the internet as the only place to be…

@kasdeya >which is currently in the midst of a controversy involving child safety concerns
isn't that the constant state of things?

@kasdeya I think this is also a very good subject to look at the lens of: kids are one of the most marginalised groups. They have so few rights or agency, and this only doubles things down.

I remember spending hours on the Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and Disney websites playing the flash games, I didn't feel the need to go to any other page.

My nephew, on the other hand, a few weeks ago asked me to help him open a Twitter account, and he's not more than 12 years old...

Obviously I refused, but I always think: What else does it have besides Roblox and YouTube?

@kasdeya

@kasdeya McDonald's took down their playground equipment... Which was part of destroying third places for hit and git capitalism. It's all connected.

@kasdeya
Difficult to monetise websites for kids so 'big tech' isn't interested.

@kasdeya "La problema es el capitalismo"

@th3f4ult @kasdeya you can mitigate that if you make the platform safety-first and have a dedicated team for it.
Also, it's up to the parents to take care of the children, tbh. Using phones as a digital pacifier is a decision, and now because of that, I might have to send my private data to a corporation that doesn't have children's safety as their interest but to make plenty of money, because the government decided to subcontract it instead of doing it themselves.

@kasdeya the smaller places still exist, they are just not newsworthy anymore as its not a big stock driven company behind.

@kasdeya I’m skeptical that the old things for kids were free of child safety concerns.

@QueerMatters @kasdeya part of the problem is definitely the lack of third spaces that kids can go to anymore. And the increasing anxiety of parents wishing to protect their children as a result

Especially does not help that children don’t typically have access to payment systems. Which makes them a pretty unprofitable group to exploit beyond data collection (which is supposed be protected as well. But we also have no idea how to do that without beginning to marginalize other groups even further)